This invention relates to a stethoscopic apparatus designed for multiple auscultation and historical recording of a patient and also designed for clearly transmitting the detected sound from the body portion of a patient.
A stethoscope is an indispensable medical instrument for detecting the sound of a body portion such as heart, lung, trachea, blood vessels, intestine, fetal heart, pulse beat, etc., so as to diagnose the illness of patients by doctors. The structure of the known stethoscope is usually composed of a chest piece with a diaphragm and a bell, a rubber tube connected to the chest piece at one end, and a pair of eartips arranged at another end of the rubber tube through a pair of flexible binaurals. This known stethoscope, though normally used by doctors, has the following problems:
(1) In order to allow the user to perform the auscultation without interference by external noise, the binaurals of the known stethoscope must be sufficiently resilient, which is uncomfortable for the user. If the resilience of the binaurals is reduced to a certain limit for user's comfort, the relay of the detected sound to the user's ear will be poorer than ever before.
(2) In addition to the above-noted defect, the sound detection of the known stethoscope is always made through the chest piece, which is positioned on the patient's body for obtaining the sound and effecting diagnosis. However, as the sound generated from the patient's body is usually very weak and also varies, and transformation of the detected sound is often caused by the known stethoscope, correct diagnosis cannot be made easily, and even erroneous diagnosis may be incurred from the transformed sound.
(3) Since the known stethoscopes are generally designed for a single user, it is very inconvenient if consultation and/or bed-side teaching is required for the same patient, particularly a female one, because the examination area is confined to a specific spot such as the heart, lung, etc., and observers need to perform the auscultation one after another on the specific spot for the same patient. Meanwhile, owing to a different time and different operation of each observer with different types of stethoscopes, various detected sounds may result in various diagnoses. Particularly, when a bed-side teaching has to be conducted, it is difficult to obtain unified diagnosis with the known stethoscopes.
(4) Since the known stethoscopes are normally designed to perform auscultation only on the spot, it is hard to make a diagnosis from a very weak and transient sound produced by the body portion of a patient, and, moreover, there is no recording function provided for the known stethoscopes to record the sound required for the patient's medical history for current diagnosis or for bed-side teaching purpose.
(5) It is sometimes necessary to transmit the sound produced by the body portions of a patient to a doctor who is located in a remote place for consultation purpose. However, unfortunately the conventional stethoscopic apparatus do not have proper means to achieve such mechanism.
In U.S. patent application entitled "Multi-Functional Radio/Wire Stethoscopic Apparatus" filed on Nov. 4, 1986 with Ser. No. 926,578 by the inventor of this application, there has been disclosed an improved stethoscopic apparatus which can be used to clearly detect the sound produced by the body portions of a patient and also to record the sound for the patient's history for correct diagnosis as well as for teaching purpose.